| Summary: | <p>The primary goal of this project was to increase understanding about the mechanisms and processes of desistance from crime and drug use among current urban, largely racial minority, and increasingly women criminal offenders. This research follows former drug-involved offenders for over 20 years post-release from prison in Delaware. The project was guided by Paternoster and Bushway's identity theory of desistance (2009), which relies on the concept of identity that is theorized to provide direction for an individual's behavior. The identity theory of desistance emphasizes the individual identity as reflexive, interpretive, and as such, premised on human agency.</p> <p>The project featured a multi-method design and unfolded in two phases. The sample for this study originated from a previous sample used to evaluate the efficacy of therapeutic communities in reducing recidivism and relapse for drug involved offenders released from Delaware prisons in the early 1990s. In Phase I of the present study, official arrest records were obtained for the previous sample of 1,250 offenders from 1956 to 2008 from both official Delaware Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) and National Crime Information Center (NCIC) data sources. From these data, race- and gender-specific offending trajectory models were estimated. In Phase II, in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 304 respondents selected from within the different offending trajectory groups. The goal of the interviews was to examine the processes and mechanisms that led to persistence or desistance from crime and drugs.</p> <p>DS1 contains NCIC and Delaware SAC arrest records for the full sample in Phase I. DS2 contains demographic information and trajectory group assignment for the Phase II interview sample participants. <strong>Qualitative data are not available for this collection.</strong></p>
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